'Major Systems Failure' Indicated

CNSNews.com ^ | 2-01-03

[hope]

'Major Systems Failure' Indicated">

'Major Systems Failure' Indicated
By Susan Jones and Scott Hogenson
CNSNews.com Staff
February 01, 2003

(CNSNews.com) - A senior government official says NASA's data shows a "major systems failure," CBS News reported Saturday afternoon.

Videotape showed a large piece of something coming off the orbiter immediately prior to its mid-air breakup over Texas Saturday morning. NASA reportedly is focusing on the space shuttle Columbia's left wing as the possible source of the catastrophic failure.

NASA said there is no indication that the breakup was caused by anything or anyone on the ground.

However, press reports noted that during the launch of the space shuttle Columbia 16 days ago, a piece of insulation came loose and appeared to hit the left wing of the shuttle. It's not clear what the extent of the damage may have been, if there was any damage at all.

Temperature stress on the shuttle is highest during the re-entry period. It was on re-entry that Mission Control lost communications with Columbia.

Space shuttles are protected from the heat of re-entry by an intricate system of heat tiles, according to Robert G. Melton, a professor of aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University.

According to Melton's research, "shuttle orbiters use a system of 30,000 tiles made of a silica compound that does not ablate, but does rapidly radiate heat away from the orbiter. These tiles can be repaired in space."

Melton's research notes that the "major disadvantages are fragility," among the heat tiles, which are "easily damaged before launch and by orbital debris; lots of tile damage due to debris since anti-satellite tests in mid-80s.

Another shortcoming of the tiles, according to Melton's research, is their complexity and the fact that "many people (are) needed to manually attach tiles to orbiter in a tedious and time-consuming process, and to inspect them all before launch."

Melton's research indicates that during the re-entry period, maximum temperatures are recorded at an altitude of 40 miles with a speed of 15,000 miles per hour.

It is also during this time that communications are routinely disrupted because of ionization, which is caused by the high temperatures and "creates an impenetrable barrier to radio signals," according to Melton's research.

According to NASA, contact with Columbia was lost when the shuttle was flying at roughly 200,000 feet at a speed of more than 12,000 miles per hour.

 

[albee]

"(CNSNews.com) - A senior government official says NASA's data shows a "major systems failure," CBS News reported Saturday afternoon.

As the Russians say, "Gee, No Krapski?"

[finnman69]

Cmon, this is such BS. It's not the shuttle, its the wrong shape, ahs the wrong proportions, is incapable of flying that fast through the atmosphere sideways, and if it had major damage such as wingtips missing it woulkd have tumbled immediately. Would both wingtips break off in a perfect symmetric manner? No. I imagine as soon as there was a rough leading edge such as a riupped off wingtip, the entire wing would have folded and unzipped.

They have been discussing the zipper effect all day on the news, whereby if a small area is damaged at high speed under extreme atmospheric conditions, the entire area will 'unzip' and come apart.

[GRRRRR]

Yup, I've seen the video several more times now and FreedomCalls has it right. Good going, MORE PROOF, Freepers are smarter than the average bear!!

BooBoo & Yogi

[Justa]

You know, if the 'apeture folks' were really interested in the truth why wouldn't they post the clearest, most in-focus frames of the object in the video? If it is the apeture, surely a clear image of the "photographic anomoly" would prove it. Why is it they always post and refer to the fuzzy, distorted video frame images? Talk about pushing a bias.

There are several quite in-focus and clear video frames which show both the shuttle, a large, star-shaped hole in it's underside 2/3s back, left of center, and the tail spinning off to the right, with the black rudder lines visible on it.

My take:

-L wing heats up from thermal tile damage.

-The L main landing gear gets too hot and explodes over CA, reigning debris.

-The explosion cuts power and telemetry in the shuttle, crippling it.

-The force of the explosion (L side) rolls, then yaws the shuttle to the right.

-The shuttle continues its descent, now facing almost due South, sideways to it's glide path, without power.

-3 Min.s later it crosses over Texas and is captured on amateur video, facing South, large hole center-left 2/3rds back, without a tail and in several frames the tail can clearly be seen tumbling away to the right. In at least one frame even the tail's black rudder lines are visible.

-Travelling down it's glide path facing sideways it burns and breaks-up beginning over the Dallas area. The video in effect shows this at it's conclusion.

Keep in mind the video shot from Dallas is 3 min.s after telemetry was lost from the shuttle @ 207,000 and 12,500mph. Instead of 36 mi.s it would likely have been 20 or so miles high when it passed over the Dallas area. The video shot is by no means improbable. If I can make out the tops of water towers at 30mi.s across Nantucket sound on a good day I think the shuttle at 20 mi.s in altitude is even more probable given the fact the observer was at 1,000' alt. and it was a clear, dry and calm day.

[finnman69]

C'mon, ya think WFAA hasd not gone over its own footage frame by frame with professional quality editing equipment to look for anything telling? Why would WFAA sit on it? Guess what? They would not sit on it.

I have looked at the video you posted the link to several times full screen and see no clear image of the shuttle. I see a shape that is sort of similar to the shuttle, but it aint the shuttle.

[muffaletaman]

Actually, I think it is most likely that the precipitating structural failure occured long before the ultimate breakup... perhaps over California as based on initial telemetry anomolies occuring 6 minutes before the breakup over Texas.

On another thread I discussed how documenting the location of each piece of debris on the ground will be an important part of "reverse engineering" the breakup.

They will back that into and correlate it with the various video records showing the dispersion of the major structural sections which were shattered and began to scatter imediately after the catastrophic failure.

The sudden appearance of the huge diamond-shaped cloud is most likely the actual catatrophic failure of the orbiter, when it suddenly transferred a huge amount of its energy into the atmosphere (like a frangible projectile), that most likely generated the shock wave heard at the ground as an explosion.

I have been under the shuttle during a night landing several years ago, at about 4:30AM near Navasota, Texas. The normal, true sonic boom (an unmistakeable characteristic double-thud) was barely audible even at that very quiet time of night/early morning, and reached my ears after the shuttle had gone from being near straight overhead to about 40 degrees or less above the horizon (I made notes at the time but haven't located my notebook yet to get the exact timing.)

During this landing I observe it almost completely from horizon to horizon. At night the plasma ball left a glowing orange trail behind the shuttle that persisted for several minutes. It swirled and looked just like a dust cloud behind a car driving fast down a dirt road. Except of course that at the altitude the shuttle was at, the observable glowing trail was several miles wide.

When the shuttle dissappeared in the haze above the eastern horizon, the westernmost part of the trail was still barely visible, and the orange glowing trail stretched across almost the entire sky... it was awesome.

But over Texas, the shuttle's normal sonic boom was barely audible, most likely due to both the distance and the rarified air at that altitude.

The huge explosion heard (my brother who lives in Longview, TX heard it - he thought a chemical plant he lives only 4 miles from had blown up - the blast was that powerful) was the tremendous shock wave generated when the shuttle mechanically disintegrated and transferred a huge pulse of energy into the atmosphere. This is almost certainly the event appearing as the sudden blossoming of the huge diamond-shaped cloud, which continued across the sky with chunks dispersing from it.

Other things that could have failed, such as an APU explosion, etc., may have been the precipitating event.

But if tile damage occured at launch, then it is not difficult to see a series of events unfolding over a period of minutes, which would lead to loss of a section of a control surface, or buckling/failure of a structural member in a wing, and then a subsequent cascade of events until the catastrophic disintegration occurred.

Because of the extreme nose high atitude during the period of re-entry we are discussing (40 degrees), the shuttle tail is completely shielded from any "airstream". It is in the vacuum trailing the shuttle as it punches through the atmosphere, moving so fast that the rarified air at that altitude is blasted away from the path, and doesn't close behind the shuttle until well after it has passed.

The shuttle in this phase of the landing actually "tacks" significantly to the left and right to disperse energy, but all of these motions are controlled by thrusters - not aerodynamic control surfaces.

The elevons and tail don't begin to function as control surfaces until the final manuever phase, well past Alabama / Fla panhandle, when the speed has dropped to about 1700 mph and the altitude is about 90,000 feet (5 - 6 minutes until landing.

Clearly, the flight control surfaces (indeed, ALL surfaces) were destroyed due to either loss of attitude control, or a significant mechanical/structural integrity failue.

I hope that they can recover enough debris to reveal by what they find, how far it is separated, and what they DON'T find (because it was vaporized, or failed over California / Az / NMexico) that they CAN deduce what happened.

My bet is on tile failure due to launch damage.

Just like cold weather launches, O-ring seals and Challenger. And running out of luck.

There has been tile damage before but it has always been minor and caused no real propblem. In other words, we have been lucky.

This time, if the damage that occurred WAS too severe - if the "poof" they saw was tile destruction that penetrated to the skin - then the die was cast... the failure inevitable.

= = = = = = = = = =

Our condolences to the families of these astronauts - our respect and gratitude to the astronauts themselves, who have given their lives on the trail to space, like the pioneers of all ages - those who venture over the horizon to open a new frontier, a new future for those who follow.

MFLTMN

[Alberta's Child]

That's a very good question -- I don't know which exact point in the landing process the filming begins, and how much resolution they can get from the ground.

[Alberta's Child]

If you have time to go back over the FreeRepublic threads from yesterday, there is at least one containing some comments from people in California who thought the re-entry looked unusual.

[Alberta's Child]

It would not surprise me if NASA knew all along that this mission was in jeopardy right from the moment the left wing was struck by the piece of insulation during take-off.

After the Challenger disaster in 1986, shuttles now have the ability to abort on takeoff and make an emergency landing somewhere in Spain or north Africa. The problem here is that there was very little time to make a decision about it and it has never been done before.

It may very well have been a situation where a NASA engineer estimated the risks of each scenario -- if they decided that an aborted launch had a 10% chance of catastrophic failure and a re-entry with a damaged wing had a 5% chance of failure, they may have just played the odds here and made the best decision under the circumstances.

[Alberta's Child]

Good point about the television station vetting their video clips before showing it.

In fact, before that thread was posted yesterday a few of us began to suspect that something was up when we noticed that FOX had stopped showing the first part of that video clip. Someone here on FR contacted the television station and asked about it, and after a while they posted the entire clip on their website. I'm guessing that after they got a quick look at it they thought they had something amazing on their hands that might be used as part of the investigation, but after looking at it in detail they realized it was nothing more than a problem with the camera focus.

[mvpel]

Of course, this begs the question as to why, if the aerodynamic force was sufficient to strip off the wings, the rudder, and the main engine bells, it would not have been sufficient to align the main body with the airstream like an arrow.

But it does bear a striking resemblance in any case.

[dfwgator]

Someone please help me out here. Could the shuttle crew have known something was wrong, and wouldn't there have been any communication with Mission Control? How could they not have known something was wrong before the shuttle broke apart, did it really happen that fast?

[muffaletaman]

... from a NASA info site...

Roll Schedule - as the orbiter descends through the atmosphere to a level where air pressure has built sufficiently and slows to where heating has subsided somewhat, it begins a series of four steep banks to slow down. The shuttle, in essence, fishtails through the atmosphere as it descends to dissipate its speed. The first couple of banks that the shuttle performs can often be very steep, as much as 80 degrees, that result in the shuttle's side facing toward the ground. The second, third and fourth banks are referred to as "roll reversals," since they basically reverse the shuttle's roll angle, i.e. from 80 degrees left to 70 degrees right. It is important to understand that although the shuttle is performing these steep banks, its angle of attack -- the angle of its nose toward the oncoming air pressure -- is very high, at 40 degrees for much of the entry, to protect the spacecraft from the intense heat that is generated. The angle gradually decreases, i.e. the nose is slowly brought down, as the shuttle descends and slows.

This occurs from 400,000 feet to about 100,000 feet AGL

[Barnacle]

If I understand your question correctly, all I can say is that using telephoto lenses can create optical illusions by visually compressing great distances. This can be further exacerbated with the use of super high power lenses as they use to film the shuttle several miles away. The result can be a skewing of the image and the impression that it is flying with a heavy yaw.

[Steve0113]

to slow the satellite down from 25,400 fps to a "reasonable" speed of 5280 fps would require about 170,000 lb of propellant -- roughly the weight of the Shuttle itself.

Isn't it also true that, long before its speed were reduced to something reasonable, the shuttle would begin dropping like a rock toward Earth? I'm referring to the loss of centrifugal force which had maintained the orbit.

[finnman69]

I agree it bears a resemblance, but that's all. What you are calling the OMS ears appear to be almost out at the wingtips...now look at the actual orbiter pic which you and myself both poityed and compare.

It's not the shuttle.

Ask yourself this....at this point in the video there does not appear to be a smoke trail or other parts breaking off. If the wings were coming apart, if the rudder was ripped off and especially if the engines were torn off, there would be a lot more smoke and debris coming off this image.

[finnman69]

I wrote the station myself and asked them to explain the image. They have not written back and they certainly do not have it posted at WFAA.

[Steve0113]

If they would have known it was that bad they'd have had them stay either in the shuttle and await rescue or go to the ISS and tether over one at a time (EVA suit) and wait on that.

I heard somewhere that Columbia (unlike all the other shuttles) was too heavy to travel all the way up to the ISS. So that option was out.

[mvpel]

What you are calling the OMS ears appear to be almost out at the wingtips...

My second image shows where the parts would have to be detached in order to have an appearance similar to the blurry video image. I thought I didn't need to label the missing wings in the presence of that second image in my post, but I guess I did.